It appears to me that the meteor began to flare brightly, then it looks like it discharged to Earth, @41 sec there appears to be a discharge down. On to 44sec, after the huge flash, there appears to be a residual downward trail. The huge flash appears to have directed most of itself toward Earth, perpendicular to meteor path.

Are my eyes playing tricks on me.?

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.""Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.""Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

I suppose it could be a camera lens artifact, but as more footage becomes available I think more questions will be raised about the occurrence. On this vid, the explosions are more like high powered rifle or small cannon 'cracks', not sonic boom type noise. The way the windows shatter is also telling, but telling what? If the explosions are dielectric breakdowns of the layers of the object, and sound is really an electrical phenomena, than were those bangs created by some type of super-soliton, and the windows shattered by dielectric interactions with the glass?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0cRHsApzt8
Another thing that came to mind was wondering if an impactor could ever hit us head-on, or will they all have low angles of entry? If one could approach perpendicularly, would any explosions be much more powerful due to passing through a much steeper vertical electric field gradient?
Also, I don't think that when these objects enter out atmosphere they contain iron or other metals, they are rock which has undergone transmutation much as the David Hudson fractional vaporisation experiments seemed to show.
Anyway, I'd agree with your eyes Sparky, and it may be that the object was leaving an ion tail that would act as a conductor allowing charge equalisation between higher and lower elevations, and something has to happen to equalise that differential.
It could be a little scary if Earth was passing through a 'cloud' of such object though, imagine those events just happening one after the other for an extended period. Good time to be a glazier I suppose!

In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.""Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.""Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

There are too many, some of them too big and concentrated in specific orbits. That´s why I think the asteroids (or most of them) are the debris of at least one exploded planet and the "Kuipers" are the debris of at least two exploded planets. Maybe this happened within human history in the "Titans clash"? Jupiter could have destroyed the planet(s) past Mars orbit honoring the "not even all the others together could beat Him".

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.""Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.""Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

I didn't say that he was in error.....just that he has quite the imagination.

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.""Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.""Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

Imagination? The very first hypothesis about the asteroids was the exploded planet.

Although Van Flandern provides some evidence none of the mechanisms for planetary explosion seem convincent. Close encounters with bigger planets (g.e., Jupiter and Saturn) and colossal electric interactions is a much better idea. I can anything but wonder if the myths of the oceans made from the blood of a god and the lands from the body of a god have something to do with this.

Of course, given a planet about to explode no matter when or where we can ask what comes next. Models for stellar supernova based on purely mechanical expansion and spherical symmetry don´t match data. Probably the picture isn´t simply a shitload of rocks coming apart and involves cosmic lightning and asymmetrical ejection of fragments.